The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1534]
seeming directly to acknowledge — my sense — oh, my keen — my profound — my exulting — my ecstatic sense of the honor you had conferred on me. To accomplish, as I wished it, precisely what I wished, seemed impossible, however; and I was on the point of abandoning the idea, when my eyes fell upon a volume of my own poems; and then the lines I had written, in my passionate boyhood, to the first, purely ideal love of my soul — to the Helen Stannard of whom I told you — flashed upon my recollection. I turned to them. They expressed all — all that I would have said to you — so fully — so accurately and so exclusively, that a thrill of intense superstition ran at once throughout my frame. Read the verses and then take into consideration the peculiar need I had, at the moment, for just so seemingly unattainable a mode of communicating with you as they afforded. Think of the absolute appositeness with which they fulfilled that need — expressing not only all that I would have said of your person, but all that of which I most wished to assure you, in the lines commencing “On desperate seas long wont to roam.” Think, too, of the rare agreement of name — Helen and not the far more usual Ellen [—] think of all these coincidences, and you will no longer wonder that, to one accustomed as I am to the Calculus of Probabilities, they wore an air of positive miracle. There was but one difficulty. — I did not wish to copy the lines in my own MS — nor did I wish you to trace them to my volume of poems. I hoped to leave at least something of doubt on your mind as to how, why, and especially whence they came. And now, when, on accidentally turning the leaf, I found even this difficulty obviated, by the poem happening to be the last in the book, thus having no letter-press on its reverse — I yielded at once to an overwhelming sense of Fatality. From that hour I have never been able to shake from my soul the belief that my Destiny, for good or for evil, either here or hereafter, is in some measure interwoven with your own. — Of course, I did not expect on your part any acknowledgment of the printed lines “To Helen”; and yet, without confessing it even to myself, I experienced an undefinable sorrow in your silence. At length, when I thought you had time fully to forget me (if indeed you had ever really remembered) I sent you the anonymous lines in MS. I wrote them, first, through a pining, burning desire to communicate with you in some way — even if you remained in ignorance of your correspondent. The mere thought that your dear fingers would press — your sweet eyes dwell upon characters which I had penned — characters which had welled out upon the paper from the depths of so devout a love — filled my soul with a rapture which seemed then all sufficient for my human nature. It then appeared to me that merely this one thought involved so much of bliss that here on Earth I could have no right ever to repine — no room for discontent. — If ever, then, I dared to picture for myself a richer happiness, it was always connected with your image in Heaven. But there was yet another idea which impelled me to send you those lines: — I said to myself — The sentiment — the holy passion which glows within my spirit for her, is of Heaven, heavenly, and has no taint of the Earth. Thus there must lie, in the recesses of her own pure bosom, at least the germ of a reciprocal love; and if this be indeed so, she will need no earthly clew — she will indistinctly feel who is her correspondent. — In this case, then, I may hope for some faint token, at least, giving me to understand that the source of the poem is known and its sentiment comprehended even if disapproved. Oh God! how long — how long I waited in vain — hoping against Hope — until at length I became possessed with a spirit far sterner — far more reckless than Despair. — I explained to you — but without detailing the vital influence they wrought upon my fortune — those singular additional yet seemingly trivial fatalities by which you happened to address your lines to Fordham in place of New-York — by which my